Climate Change Poster Generator
Print + Code
2022.10 | Class Project | 2 Weeks | Riso Printing + p5.js
Assignment Prompt
βGenerative practices change the role of the artist or designer, where rather than conceiving and controlling every detail of the final outcome, they suddenly become the architect of a system, defining the possibilities and constraints of that system and selecting desired results.
Your task is to program some sort of design system and use it to generate a design for a political poster (or flier) or at least an element of it.β
I chose climate change as the topic. I got a lot of design inspiration from the Mate Act Now project and then used it as an extension to brainstorming.
As for my posters, I decided to use the combination of generative graphics + generative texts to make the whole poster in p5.
Generative Graphics
For the graphics section, I took inspiration from a business card and designed abstract earth using multiple circles with different transparency. Each time you refresh the sketch, all the circles will have a slight random shift to make it more variable. At first, I wanted to use the p5.pattern library to add more color variation, but it couldnβt be used for Riso, so I ended up using strokes instead of fills to make it more visually appealing.
I exported the circles in the one Riso layer and printed them on different pages. Since the background color could not be printed as large bulk areas, I used colored paper for printing and tried many color combinations.
Earth with special pattern
Earth with a stroke
Generative Text
After printing the earth graphics, I tried to layer the text on them. For the text, instead of using random slogans, I searched for a webpage with 200+ slogans about climate change, then I put all the slogans into a Word Cloud Generator and grabbed 9 words that appeared most in it. I put them into an array as the primary words of the climate change campaign.
I then used the shuffle function to randomize the array and let it print the top 3 to 5 words each time, so the text on the poster was random and not repetitive.
Finally, I printed the posters seen below. I am thrilled that the text and visuals can be exhibited harmoniously on the paper, and the echoes between the posters can be easily observed.
